The Storied Kafka Novella That May Have Never Existed

Did you know that Kafka wrote kind letters to a girl who lost her doll in the park—as the doll? And that this was meant to help her slowly get over the loss of said doll?

I, for one, did not. It’s a story mentioned briefly on a wall text at the Morgan Library’s new exhibition in lovely tribute to Franz Kafka, on view through April 13. And reader, it knocked me out. Internet sleuths, of course, don’t believe it actually happened. Dora Diamant, Kafka’s partner for the last year of his baroquely sad life, claimed it did, and said she saw the strange, pathetic comedy unfold before her own eyes.

One day, in Berlin, the lovers came upon a despondent girl from their neighborhood (Steiglitz), weeping in a park. When pressed, the girl said that she had lost her doll. Diamant and Kafka combed the park for it to no avail. Then, that very night, Kafka apparently set to work on a special project: a brief literary correspondence to the girl, in which he took on the guise of the doll, writing from afar and explaining that it, the doll, had many special adventures it had to attend to. As Diamant recalled in the early 1950s to Marthe Robert, a French translator of Kafka, Kafka feverishly wrote a veritable novella to the girl over the span of about three weeks, narrating the doll’s life from the first person: it grew up, it went to school, it met people.

Knowing the game had to end, however, drove Kafka miserable (sounds like our Franz); therefore, in perhaps the only stark happy ending in the Kafka oeuvre, he married the doll off, with pomp and dress and cakes galore, concluding with the doll’s gentle plea to the girl: “You yourself will understand, we must give up seeing each other.”

Although the show spans Kafka’s career, the doll letters do not appear anywhere among the papers on display at the Morgan. They are not among the opening pages of the manuscript for his most famous tale, The Metamorphosis (1915)—that biography of the vermin formerly known as Gregor Samsa, also composed at a feverish clip. They’re not next to the final page of The Castle (1926), which infamously breaks off mid-sentence. Nor are they next to the curators’ displays explaining Kafka’s tortured relationship to many fathers: the father of Judaism; the father of good health; and the literal big father, Mr. Hermann Kafka, who made so much noise in the family apartment that it drove Franz into fits of rage—which only fueled the desperation we see on display so gloriously in Franz’s diaries, his letters to absent lovers and booming fathers, and his drawings of spindly emaciated sons being berated by paternal figures.

Who knows if the doll letters still exist? Who cares? I love that the Morgan exhibition, chronologically arranged, ends on the idea of the doll letters. What we do see, in a section on Kafka’s “afterlife,” or the works that he inspired, are proofs of a lovely-seeming children’s book inspired by the doll letters, Kafka and the Doll (2021), written by Larissa Theule and illustrated by Rebecca Green. Fictional or not, the Kafka-doll story busts open the Kafka cliché. (If I hear that stupid, say-nothing adjective “Kafkaesque” one more time…) Yeah, sure, his life was sad: sanatoriums, paranoia, unfinished novels, early death. But it takes someone intimate with tragedy to write good comedy: the apprenticeship of graveness can produce brief pockets of levity.

I, for one, believe those doll letters exist. I will choose to believe a man like Kafka could and would go out of his way to write something as moving as those letters, to a girl who was about to face a loss, the first of many losses. And our Franz knew loss all too deeply. I believe he knew, like Old Man Freud, the power of transference. You don’t need physical proof to register the weight of care; in fact, you might go mad in search of it. You need only a casual faith in something beyond the self.